The Lord’s eternal purpose is to bring pass the immortality and eternal life of humans. The truth is always incredible, because the blind eyes of humanity can see only half-truths except be great effort. It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream; to see the wide vision of empire fade into real ashes and dirt; to feel the pang of the conquered, and yet know that with the bad that fell on one day, something was vanquished that deserved to live, something killed that in justice had not dared to die; to know that with the right that triumphed, something of wrong, something sordid and mean, something less than the broadest and best. All this is bitter hard, and several people have found in its excuse for sulking, and brooding, and listless waiting. Many theories have been propounded through centuries, but none has been entirely satisfactory. We humans are limited in time and space, our perception and intellect are subject to error, our point of view limits what we can apprehend and understand. Therefore, no statement wears its truth like a badge; its truth can be determined only by what follows from it in the course of experience. The natural World we perceive through our senses (see, hear, touch) reveals only a fallen, shadow, incomplete versions of this ideal truth. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8
Truth is relative to the evidence and to the purpose of the investigator; no degree of verification will ever establish the absolute truth of a statement. Truth is personal and particular, dynamic and progression, not eternal or absolute, but the best solution found so far for any problem. That which thwarts or defeats the purpose of an inquiry we call false; that which furthers it we call true. Truth is that manipulation of objects which turns out upon trial to be useful, primarily for any human end, but ultimately for that perfect harmony of our whole life which forms our final aspiration. God created an ordered natural World. God also created human’s ability to use reason. Therefore, God created the human intellect and will, thus, celebrating and developing human freedom, intellect and will would promote God’s will. However, the World is still a fallen version of God’s eternal truths. All truths work for us in some way and there is no useless knowledge. However, lies are deliberately untrue but may be useful, as in propaganda. There is a shocking lack of self-respect by so many individual, as is evidenced by their manners and engulfing waves of permissiveness which seem to be moving over the World like a flush flood. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8
We see among us so many who seem to be forsaking standards of decency or an understanding of the meaning of time-honored words which, since the beginning of time, have had real meaning to our forebears; words that have made for strength or character and righteousness and harmony and unity and peace in the World. There are eternal words which, if understood and taught and practiced, would being salvation to every man, woman, boy, and girl who does now live or has ever lives or will yet live in the World. Happiness is the quiet, joyous assent that accompanies our actions when we carry out for its own sake some activity springing from our talents. This kind of activity is to be evaluated as ethically worthwhile behavior. The joy in such activity resembles the joy of a child at play, and should be regarded generally as the criterion for emotional and intellectual youthfulness. This youthfulness is not tied to physical age. Anyone who has found the activity proper to oneself, and has thus experienced this quiet, joyous happiness, has realized the highest attainable ethical goal and will keep one’s youthfulness throughout one’s entire life. Acting out of a sense of duty is ethically valuable only is a quiet satisfaction accompanies the action. Moral value attaches only to vital action; the sign of life is youthfulness, but we are young only when we act from joy. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8
When the quiet, inner joyous assent accompanies our action, we fulfill the requirements of the highest principles of ethical value. This inner consciousness that each one of us has of oneself as will is primitive and irreducible. Virtue and chastity, honesty, morality, faith, character are all great qualities which have built great men and women and point the way by which one may find happiness in the living World of today and eternal joy in the World to come. These are the qualities which are the anchors to our lives, in spite of the trials, the tragedies, the pestilences, and the cruelties of war which bring in their wake appalling destruction, hunger, and bloodshed. The will reveals itself immediately to everyone as the in-itself of one’s own phenomenal being and the awareness we have of ourselves as will is quite different from the awareness we have of ourselves as body. To those who fail to heed the warnings of those who are striving to teach these principles and choose to go in the opposite course, they will eventually find themselves in the pitiable state which you are witnessing so often among us. Human nature as manifested an astonishing prescience. We customarily think of ourselves as being essentially free and rational agents, whereas in fact the principal sources and springs of our conduct consist in deep-lying tendencies and drives of whose character we are often wholly unaware. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8
Consciousness is the mere surface of our mind, of which, as of the Earth, we do not know the inside, but only the crust, and in consequence we often put entirely false constructions upon the behavior in which these basic impulses are expressed. The ignorance we display, the rationalizations which in all innocence we provide, may themselves have a motive, although not one we are aware of. Thus, the will prevents the rise to consciousness of thoughts and desires that, if known, would arouse feelings of humiliation, embarrassment, or shame. Another example of the same process is to be found in instances of memory failure. It is not a mere accident that we do not remember certain things, since there may be powerful inducement for us not to do so; events and experiences can be completely suppressed, becoming for us as if they had never taken place, simply because unconsciously we feel them to be unendurable. And in extreme cases this can lead to a form of insanity, with fantasies and delusions replacing what has thus been extruded from consciousness. It seems it may result from the failure of the individual to have self-respect. Every person stamps one’s value on oneself. The price we challenge for ourselves is given us by others. We are made great or little by our own will. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8
It may be claimed that it is only in virtue of our knowledge of what is it to act in accordance with consciously formed choices that the explanation of certain actions in terms of secret or concealed determinations of the will becomes intelligible. When one does not have that love for oneself, other consequences can be expected to follow. Some people cease to love life. Or if they marry, they find that they have lost their love for their spouse, and children—no love of home or respect for the country in which one lives, and eventually these individuals have lost their love of God. Rebellion in land, disorder and the lack of love in the family, children disobedient to parents, loss of contact with God, all because that person has lost respect for oneself. The rowdiness, the incorrigibility is more often than not a bid for a kind of attention or popularity that physical and mental endowments do not invite. So the unruly people are often but a reflection of an individual who is seek, by superficial adornment or by abnormal conduct (in a strange way), to supply that indefinable quality they may think is charm—a clumsy attempt to draw attention by conduct which certainly reflect that inward frustration because of the lack of understanding of their true identity as human beings. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8
However, having been spirits and now having bodies, we are among those who passed that first test and were given the privilege of coming to Earth as mortal individuals. If we had not passed that test, we would not be were with mortal bodies, but would have been denied this privilege and would have followed Satan or Lucifer, as he came to be known, as did thirty three percent of the spirits created in that premortal existence who were deprived of the privilege of having mortal bodies, These are now among us, but only in their spiritual forms, to make a further attempt to thwart the plan of salvation by which all who would obey would have the great glory of returning to God our Father who gave us life. Every person who is called to do an important work in the kingdom of God, is called to that work and foreordained to that work before the World was. You are all the sons and daughter of God. Your spirits were created and lived as organized intelligences before the World was, and are blessed to have a physical body because of your obedience to certain commandments in that premortal state. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8
You are now born into a family to which you have come, into the nations through which you have come, as a reward for the kind of lives you lived before you came here. Regardless of how rich or whatever, it is a blessing to be in human form. There are spirits who wish they could have a chance to have a mortal body. We are here because of the faithfulness of each of those who lived before this World was created. The goal directed course of living processes arise out of the meaningful arrangement of these systems, and their structure and behavior are explained by strictly causal natural laws, making unnecessary the assumption of immaterial vital forces. However, some have a pessimistic view of the future development of culture. It is feared that people will become part of a machines, a socialized humanoid—organized for common work down to the last detail, but, as in the early ages, without a history. “Do you know that the temple of God dwells in you? If anyone defile the temple of God, one shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which your temple is,” reports (1 Cor. 3.16-17). It is important to help people to moral regeneration, if possible, to restore one’s self-respect. God is powerful to the fulfilling of all his words. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8